by Diana Graves
I ventured out only long enough to grab us some supper from the cafeteria. The whole building did seem a lot calmer. I could still sense the fear and grief people were feeling, but none of the violence was there.
I saw Tristan sitting with Alicia and Kamaria at a dining table, but I didn’t say hello. I’d imagine Tristan was still mad at me, and I felt guilty for having hidden from Alicia before. We were best friends once, but we were so different. We’d grown apart. She was lively, happy, a real party girl. I was—pathetic. They were both better off without me.
SEATTLE’S LOST
WHEN WE WOKE up Tuesday morning, Alistair had a surprise for us. He’d created a children’s room, a place where all the kids and their families could wait out the crisis separated from the mob. It was such a clever space, full of toys and bright colors. There were lighthearted movies playing in the background, and a sitting area for the parents. I spent the entire day there with the kids. It was better than the halls, packed with scared people, or being cooped up in Alistair’s room. My only complaint about the kid’s space was that it was set up in one of the vacant rooms two floors down from the main floor, Damon’s floor. His old classroom was just across the hall, his office was next door and farther down the hall was the door to his apartment. What lay behind that door, I didn’t know. Probably a mess of black ivy growing thick over the available space. His ashes, Adia’s life force. I didn’t want to think about it.
The rooms were beyond full, and I only recognized a face or two, but no one I knew by name. Thomas was quietly sitting next to me on a long couch crowded with other people. We were watching Isobel play alone with the blocks. She seemed content in being alone, but it made me sad to see it.
“What’s going to happen?” Thomas whispered.
I looked at him, and for all the growing he’d done while I was dead, he still looked so young. But I was the sort who chose hard truths over sweet lies.
“The zombies are people, they just need a cure. We have one, but it’s hard to administer. If we can figure that out then we can beat this thing, and maybe years from now Washington will have a sense of normalcy back,” I shrugged. “If we can’t, I don’t know.”
“No, I meant now that Dad is gone,” he said. “What are we going to do?”
My brow furrowed, because I hadn’t thought about it. There was so much I was refusing to think about in regards to Damon. Like the last words we shared. My self-hate wanted so badly to lament over our fight and breakup. I really wanted to beat myself up for being with Alistair instead of him before he died. If I’d known our days were so few maybe I would have done things differently. My eyes were growing distant, I could feel it. I had to close them and swallow hard to regain my composure.
“Once the zombies are dealt with, I would like us to move back to the house; you, me and Isobel.”
“And what about those vines? Last night I came down here and took a look for myself. They’re all over the place in there. They’re made from Dad, so can we bring them home, too? It’d be like having a piece of him with us.”
I didn’t like the idea of having a constant reminder of what happened living in my back yard, but “Yeah, we’ll take him home.” He smiled and leaned against me.
I sniffed the air as the scent of trees and the ocean breeze perfumed the room. I turned my head toward that smell. It was coming from the elevator. “Alistair’s coming,” I said.
“Isobel will be happy to see him,” Thomas said.
“Why does Isobel like him so much?” I asked.
Thomas was quiet for a moment, staring at his lap before eventually looking back up. “I don’t want to talk bad about Dad, but after you died and well, up until a few days ago he sort of dated around a lot. Between Aunt Katie, Alistair and a few others, we were hardly ever home. Alistair was always the coolest baby sitter. He’d take us to the movies and other fun places. Sometimes we’d spend a whole week with him. He’s a great guy, you know.” Thomas looked uncomfortable, his face strained as he tried to hold back tears. “I told Dad I wished Alistair was my dad,” he cried, and I pulled him into my arms for a hug.
“Don’t cry, honey.” I rubbed my head against his. “People are complicated. No matter how well you know them or how much you love them, they have weaknesses and they make mistakes. We say things in anger because we don’t understand why they do what they do, and even if we did, we’d still be angry, but we still love them. That’s why we’re angry. If we didn’t love him, we wouldn’t have said a damn thing. He knew we loved him, he knew it,” I said, only realizing at the end that I was reassuring Thomas and myself at the same time.
“Raina,” Alistair called out from the door, and I looked up from Thomas with tears in my eyes. He moved in close, walking around others to come to us. He kneeled and hugged us both before letting go and sitting back on his heels.
“Are you okay?” he asked Thomas.
Taking in a shaky breath, Thomas said, “Yeah.” But everything about him, from his voice to his posture said otherwise. It would be a long time before he was okay.
Isobel ran up and wrapped her arms around Alistair from behind.
He smiled down at her and patted her hands softly. “I need to talk to your mommy for a moment. Do you think you can watch your brother for us?” he asked her, and she nodded vigorously.
“Are we staying in your room again tonight?” Thomas asked Alistair.
“I’d prefer you to stay on this floor. I think for now we’re going to use this floor as living and sleeping quarters for the children and their families. My staff will bring down supper and bedding for everyone.”
“Is it getting that bad up there?” I asked him.
“People don’t have a history of being civil and calm when disaster strikes. I’m sending all the children down here as they come in, where they’ll be safe.”
“Are many children coming in?” asked a woman who had been listening in on our conversation. She was middle aged and holding her toddler firmly in her arms. She had an understandable desperation about her.
Alistair looked down, “Not many.”
It hurt to hear it, but that was the reality of our situation.
“Children are weak, they’re shit at hiding and they cry too much,” said Raphael. I wanted to yell at him or say something about how crass his words were, but it was just the sad truth said plainly.
“You’ve been quiet all day?” I asked him.
“After the fight we had, I thought you needed some time to cool off.”
“I’ll never forgive what you and Mel have done to me.”
“Then kill me. You know how to now. You’re welcome by the way.”
“Don’t push it, unless you want to spend the rest of your existence as a pussy willow.”
Raphael shut up. Alistair held his hand out to me to help me to my feet. I didn’t need his help, but I took his hand anyway. It felt nice. “Thank you,” I said as I stood.
“It’s my pleasure, as always,” he said. He looked good. As down to earth as Alistair could ever look, in a white t-shirt and jeans. As for myself, I was still in my black shirt and green skirt. “I need to show you something,” he said. “We’ll talk on the way.”
“Lead the way,” I said.
“Mom,” Thomas said before we could get far. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.” Heavy words, too simple for all that they carried with them.
♦♦♦
Alistair guided me down the hall to Damon’s office and kissed me as soon as the doors closed behind us. It was a good kiss, the best really, but a bit out of place. He leaned his body in and pressed me against the wall, holding me close and taking in my scent. When he finally let go I was left breathless and staggering forward on shaky legs.
“What was that for?” I asked him.
He looked down at me with sad eyes, “I wanted to kiss you in case I never get the chance again.”
I blinked at him. He was so damn serious. “Way to be dramatic about it.”<
br />
“Raina, they’ve given up on Seattle.”
“Who?”
He seemed at a loss for words, staring at the floor and walls. “I just got off the phone with an old friend, Anthony, the master vampire of the largest collective in Seattle, Black Sirens. Like us, he took in as many people as he was able, but—the military decided Seattle was lost, and they stopped fighting. They fell back to Kent and within hours Black Sirens was assaulted by hundreds if not thousands of zombies. So far the collective is holding them off, but they don’t know how long they’ll last. He called me to warn me. We can’t depend on the military to protect us.”
“They can’t leave us like that.”
“Why can’t they, Raina?”
“We have so many people…”
“Anthony had more under his care, and they left them to fend for themselves.”
“But…”
“Raina, they gave up the mountain range. They’ve all but abandoned the small towns, and tonight they’ve given up on Seattle and all the cities north of it. They’re losing this fight.”
“We have to leave. We have to leave here, Alistair. You have a port, with boats, right?”
There was a small tweak of a smile in the corner of his lips, but it vanished as quickly as it had come. “They’re called ships, and we have one, but it won’t hold everyone here, and I can’t choose who lives and who dies.”
“Then we have to fight.”
“How?”
“We have a cure.”
He shook his head. “Fillips was right. It’s not practical. We’d have to administer the dose one by one, in a safe environment and we don’t have enough of your blood.”
“We can’t just sit here and wait for the government to give up on Tacoma, too.
“It could be worse,” he said quietly.
“What could be worse?”
“They could give up on Washington altogether. They could start talking about nuclear options, if they haven’t already. They’ve all but bombed Bellingham off the map. They’ll starting bombing Seattle and Belleview soon.”
“Nukes—bombs—,” It all seemed so surreal. “It’s not fair. We have a cure, damn it, we have a fucking cure.”
“We can’t infect every zombie out there with your blood, Raina. You don’t have enough, not enough blood, not enough time”
“But I’m not your only source. Michael and Nick have the same strand of vampirism as me. Even you carry my blood in you, remember.”
“True, but even with all our blood there wouldn’t be enough to infect everyone.”
I cocked my head to the side. Was he picturing us standing outside, with the zombies all in a line and waiting for their feel-good shot? “It only takes a drop of blood, Alistair. Just one, and I challenge you to find me a zombie without open wounds. One drop of blood in an open wound and it’s only a matter of time.” I put some space between us, walking a few paces before turning back around to look at him standing there by the door. “It could be a terrible waste of time, but anything is better than sitting around with our thumbs up our butts, waiting for what happened to Black Sires to happen to us. I don’t want to find out how long we can hold our own under that kind of violence.”
Alistair didn’t look entirely convinced, but even so he said, “We’ll need to let some wandering zombies into the gates to test with a diluted spray of some kind.”
I walked back to him. “That’s what I was thinking,” I said with a nudge of my shoulder against his arm. “Make a watered down solution with our blood and spray them from afar. You can infect dozens from a safe distance. They’ll start changing within minutes.”
“You’re such a clever girl.”
“That’s why you love me.”
“I’m not convinced it will work on a large scale, but it’s something.”
“Great. I’ll fetch Nick and Michael,” and I moved to open the door, but Alistair blocked me.
“No,” he said. “Not yet. I need time to plan everything; get the test subjects rounded up and work out all the details with Gabriel and my staff. We’ll figure it all out tonight and be ready by tomorrow evening. I’ll instruct Michael and Nick to wake up early so you can donate blood with them, okay?”
“I feel like I’m not doing anything to help.”
“You are. You’re being a mom,” he said. “Get some blood in you and sleep well.”
A CURE
A SMARTLY DRESSED woman with big hair sat somberly with her hands folded on the desk in front of her. Her makeup was as perfect as her posture as she spoke into the camera.
“Hello America. In a couple of hours we’ll enter day six of what is undoubtedly the darkest chapter in American history, as what started as a small band of zombies in rural Washington State, grew into a massive violent epidemic. The E.P.A and Homeland Security quickly began working with state officials, law enforcement and emergency response teams on the ground, but before the next morning the devastation had spread throughout Washington. Martial Law was declared, but it was too late for any evacuations to take place. The state’s borders were closed. No one goes into the state, and no one leaves, not even military officials, or political leaders. Many of Washington’s richest residents have tried to buy their way out of the state. So far no one has reported to have taken them up on that offer. The fear is just that great.”
The woman, Diane Spencer, turned to another camera and the screen was split between her and an aerial view of city rubble. It all seemed so damn serial. “What you’re seeing now is video shot by the Air Force early today with strict orders not to land on Washington soil.” A blinding light covered the screen for a moment. “As you can see, currently, drones are bombing areas of known mass infection.”
“Many are asking if these bombing sites are inhabited. Not to our knowledge. Reports indicate that all healthy humans are being escorted over the safety perimeter and into mobile refugee camps. But some Washitonians are taking a different route and turning to their non-human neighbors for help. Vampire collectives, structurally speaking, are built to withstand assault, but are these people trading one gruesome death for another? Meanwhile, the U.S. military is fighting day and night to keep the streets safe, but one after the other, every town and city between Bellingham and Seattle have been overran by the undead. Yesterday, two days before Christmas, Seattle was lost. The Emerald city burns in the night and all the world’s eyes are on Tacoma, the last large city standing in what many people are now calling, the Doomed State.”
“Turn that shit off!” Nick groaned. He, Michael and I were sitting in one of Gabriel’s small clinic rooms. We were giving as much blood as we could, but they were taking it from us faster than we could drink and circulate new blood through our bodies. I was feeling woozy weak, and by the look of my brothers, they were feeling the same. “I don’t want to watch that garbage.”
A nurse, a kindly vampire by the name of Barbra, stood on tip-toe to turn the television off where it hung high on the wall.
“It’s the only way we know what’s happening,” Michael argued. “We haven’t heard from dad. He could be dead. He never made it to Raina’s party.”
“With any luck he was picked up and put in a camp,” I said. “We can’t dwell on it.” How could I regard my father’s safety so casually? Our relationship had always been decidedly strained. He decided that, not me. Barbra approached me to take another baggy full of blood from me while I sipped on room temperature blood to keep me going. My eyes rolled up lazily to meet her face. “I think I’ve given as much as I can stand for now.” She nodded and stepped away.
“Me, too,” Michael spoke up before Barbra could turn his way.
“I—concur,” said Nick. “I feel like I’m going to pass the fuck out. And it’s not like you can fill that cart anymore,” he said, referring to the mobile refrigerated cart wheeled into the center of the room. Nick wasn’t wrong. That box was filled with our blood.
“Knock, knock,” Mato said from the open door. All eyes on h
im. “We’re ready.”
♦♦♦
Outside the snow was coming down in heavy flakes from low clouds that blocked the moonlight, making the night that much darker. We stood on a crowded fifth floor balcony overlooking the parking lot. Among those standing with me were Melvern, Mato, Michael, Nick, Seth, some of the Bastion’s top staff and Alistair himself. A short vampire by the name of Quincy was holding his cell phone up, aimed at five zombie vamps, who were cornered in a triangle of stacked cars. The strange thing was, the zombies weren’t trying to escape. They were just standing there, their minds full of static.
Seth was holding a rather long hose with an attachment to the nozzle that was probably normally meant for spraying plant feed or whatever. It was a plastic bottle screwed onto the hose in such a fashion so as to force the contents of the bottle, our blood, to mingle with the water on its way out, thusly spraying a diluted mixture at the zombies.
“Are we ready?” Alistair asked everyone.
“Yeah, I think so,” I said. From what I could see, these sad folks were bloated, torn and desperate. They smelled like shit, they looked worse. I was surprised they were moving at all. “How did you come by these things anyhow?” I asked.
A she-vamp named Roslyn answered. “I was bait for the stragglers wandering the streets. I lured them here and others boxed them in.” Roslyn was always a bit of a conundrum to me. She craved status more than anything, and for her that meant she craved to be Alistair’s number one sweetie. You’d think that would make us rivals of some sort, but you’d be wrong. Roslyn was always nice to me. She lived here, at Bastion Fatal, and every time I ever needed a change of clothes, which was often, she gladly lent them to me. I felt bad that she wasn’t mean to me, if that makes sense. Probably not. I fear that I rarely do.
“Ready the hose, Seth,” Alistair said. “Are you recording, Quincy?”
